My guess is it has to do with Reuters editorial positioning on what's going on with Ukraine and Russia. I agree though, I don't see the relevance.

> https://archive.ph/YegWz

They're accusing a specific group of for hire hackers (BellTroX and CyberRoot) in Delhi.

I get your point, but I'm assuming it's more about the fact that it's relatively cheap labour and difficult to investigate.

1. Foreign hacking groups are often beyond the reach of Western law enforcement. If a domestic threat had been to blame here, there would be legal/financial recourse for damage done. That's not the case here. Implicit in this article is the report of a new kind of warfare for which many Americans have no good defense against.

2. Standard editorial racism a la "The Oriental Threat".

I don’t think number 2 is at play here - the use of Indian hackers-for-hire has been topical in the cyber security industry recently.

...and before that, it was synonymous with tech support scams and outsourcing fraud for decades.

Is that also why this is a civil suit and not criminal charges under the CFAA?

Civil court has a lower bar for guilt, is one difference.

Can a victim file charges under the CFAA? I think only the government can do that.

Indians will read this and not once think of racism

Reminds me of the "voter ID is racist" argument

No i too was confused why indian needed mentioning

- Because Indian in this context is not a reference to the ethnicity but of location - i.e. it's not the DNA of the people that is Indian, it's the borders in which they are physically present while hacking. Many are unaware that India has a lot of phenotype diversity in its 1 billion people. There are dark skinned people in the south, light skinned people in the north, and almond shape eyed people in the east. Merely saying "Indian" does not really paint an image of anyone since we all look different, so it's a bit strange to allege racism.

- Because just mentioning it adds the following dimensions to the headline: geopolitics, outsourcing, human resources in the developing world, cybercrime & jurisdiction challenges

- Because it's allegedly true

Racism does not have to focus on skin color. As a super easy example, with Nazi did not defined races and their hierarchy by color.

Also notably, people that have a thong against Indians and Asians I encountered in real life have literally zero idea about internal subdivision. They could not tell sub-groups apart, not by look and not by language. If you have a thing against people from India, it is India in general and you don't care about anything else.

The publisher here (Reuters) is well aware of everything I've mentioned. They don't need to customize their headlines to modify the reaction of the people you are referencing. Those people should not be leading the decision making process for excluding facts from headlines.

>They don't need to customize their headlines to modify the reaction of the people you are referencing

Why not? Doesn't media regularly customize their headlines to avoid stating factually true things that would propagate negative stereotypes against minorities and other protected groups?

I think most responsible media organizations do avoid putting headlines like "Muslim man stabs three in church in Nice". Even if they do mention the religion, it is usually called "Islamic terrorism", and they have also invested quite some significant effort into emphasizing that most of regular Islamic people do not in fact have anything to do with Islamic terrorism.

As far as I can tell, media companies certainly seem to be aware of the effect their headlines can have on propagating negative stereotypes and good editorial judgement usually involves an attempt to avoid doing that as much as possible.

They absolutely should not be customizing headlines for fear of how it affects a small fringe of people who are going to think that way regardless of a Reuters headline

This is a comment from this thread itself:

"I think it's covered in the Dark Basin episode of Darknet Diaries, but India apparently has a reputation for especially aggressive private investigators, who were historically used to dig up dirt on families before committing to marriage pacts, but in the modern era are used regularly for PR and corporate blackmail. Apparently this practice is ingrained enough into the culture that digging up dirt on people by any means necessary is widely accepted, and not even illegal in most contexts."

Please tell me more about how India can ever be used purely as a location.

I'm not sure I follow the point that is being made here

The comment is referring to the standard practices of private investigators in this country, and the nature of the corporate world based on what has been seen in some TV show

What's the problem with this?

Hypothetical example: I once watched a documentary about Africa and smuggling of ivory and it showed X, Y and Z. What does this mean? That because of this documentary I have a bias about Africa which now shapes all my decision making? Where does that line get drawn? I consumed the information, what does that have to do with how it affects my opinion of the people there?

If you can't see a problem in making a broad stroke judgment on the culture of a billion people on the basis of a single documentary, I am not sure that I can have a conversation with you. Have a good day.

You've misunderstood what racism is if you think it's defined by whether or not the victim is aware of racism. Of course that's often very relevant but absolutely not necessarily.

If I walk into a friend's business, and say "woah, I did not know you hired a <derogative racist term>, they're all stupid you should fire him" and the friend immediately goes "ooh I forgot to be racist, yea I'll fire them immediately" then their firing would absolutely be racist despite the person being fired not witnessing the racist logic that causes it.

Equally with voter ID laws, they're not racist because they put mean racist message onto the ID cards or something, and whether or not victims of that sort of racist politics notice doesn't mean racism isn't involved. If somebody says "I don't think we need voter IDs, but in my district only the <some race of people> don't have photo IDs and they would all want to vote for my opponent, so let's require ID to vote!" then those people have had a racist and very unfair thing happen against them, regardless of whether they are "thinking of racism".

edit: and as a slightly easier example, if I edited a newspaper and decided that for every negative story about one skin colour would get front page billing, and every negative story about my own skin colour would get binned rather than published, then all my paper's readers might be able to look at every single article without seeing any racism in them - but their not knowing doesn't change that my theoretical editing was racist.

- Indian is not a race (see my other comment)

- Even if you use the broader definition to include nationality, in this case, the "hackers" are physically located in the geopolitical boundaries of India

- Nearly every major country with a large enough population has people in whitehat/blackhat infosec professions. It is an incredible reach to suggest that newspapers should not identify the national origin of these individuals because of what some racist readers might start to believe or become biased towards, by drawing non-existent lines to patterns that don't exist except in their own bubbles. Editorial standards and responsibility should not be driven by the weakest minds.

Definition of racism that includes nationality is not "broader". It is the definition of racism. It is also very common form of racism worldwide.

The only prominent definition one could cite which includes national origin is the one used by the United Nations

Popular dictionaries (Webster/Oxford) don't include national origin

"Indian" is not just an national identity but also an ethnic one. A person of Indian origin born in America or the UK is still very easily identifiable and is identified by their Indian identity.

The usage of the word "racism" to include xenophobia is common enough in a casual context that I cannot believe that you are simply not aware of that usage. By choosing to argue over the semantics of the word racism over usage you probably already are familiar with, you are diverting attention from what really matters here: that said racism or xenophobia exists and negatively affects real human beings.

It is not an ethnic identity (see my other comment)

Did you read my justification for saying that it is also an ethnic identity. It was literally the next sentence.

If you need such a broad term, use the word 'bias'. Racism has a specific meaning, people are holding to account for a reason.

Good luck trying to control how people use language. I was just saying that it was already a common enough usage that you should be aware of it, even if you disagree with that usage.

Has common usage subsumed any geography-based xenophobia into the word “racism”?

(Not that any xenophobia is particularly better than any other, but it’s difficult to talk to people when they use broader meanings for words you thought meant very specific thing. See also terrorism vs insurgency, genocide vs occupation, etc.)

Yes

Racism as something based on skin color only would make Nazi basically not racists in their worst acts. Cause their racism was literally Aryan race against all other races - Slavic, Jews (European Jews where white, the physical features were like somewhat bigger nose), British, French. With Jews on the bottom, as the wort enemy worst then blacks. And they would not care a bit about different kind of Indians either.

If anything, attempts to redefine racism as only American variant where it is all about shades of color is redefinition.

And obviously, ethnicity and geography goes with races.

I wasn't making any argument about this specific case (which I didn't mention at all), just pointing out that "recipient of racism (or anything similar like sexism or xenophobia) doesn't notice = there was no racism" isn't a valid argument.

Granted I haven't read the article yet, but I read some of the comments here and definitely did think of racism.

'Cus they were from India?

Haha, yes ofc. It was a tremendously minor part of the article seemingly and yet made it to the headline

Law firm being cheap? Or Indians being dangerous, I guess...

Seems relevant to the difficulty in investigating and getting any sort of justice.

Incidents and stories related to Indian hackers-for-hire have been rising in the past couple of years. A few companies have built a workable model out of it. It’s relevant context from the cyber security industry perspective, tangentially related in this case.

Maybe you missed this sentence while reading the article?

"Solomon’s suit is the latest in a series of legal actions that follows Reuters’ reporting about hired hackers operating out of India."

I did, thanks.

Since I missed that sentence it seemed odd compared to hackers out of Romania or anywhere else.

It's because it's a relatively new occurrence. Likely due to the rising employment crisis around the IT industries in the country.

Baltic hackers have been around since the internet became mainstream really. The fall of the Soviet union lead to economic hardship in most of the areas well known for hacking - and those kids coming of age shortly after had the brand new age of information to take advantage of.

It's mostly India where these hackers operate like real companies with websites, offices, bank accounts, etc...

BellTroX is well known and the Indian government seems to approve of their activities.

US and India have very enforceable bilateral cybercrime treaties. And it is very well enforced on both sides.

The article makes it seem that India as a whole is operating in some North Korea-ish way.

A US citizen can well complain to CERT-IN (https://www.cert-in.org.in/) for any reported cybercrime with proper documents and it will be treated as an enforceable crime.

In fact, quite funny considering the US Chambers of Commerce have filed an appeal with CERT-IN that the compliance requirements are very stringent (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/cert-in...)

> US and India have very enforceable bilateral cybercrime treaties. And it is very well enforced on both sides

Is this documented? If true, I suspect the image of Indian criminals being beyond the reach of the law stems from the spam call problem.

This[1] is one of the few results that comes up when you search for the keywords, fbi + justice + india + scam

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/owner-and-operator-india-base...

> one of the few results that comes up when you search for the keywords, fbi + justice + india + scam

Your link [1] mentions no sign of Indian law enforcement. Instead, “Singapore authorities apprehended Patel at the request of the United States…after Patel flew there from India…charges remain pending for other India-based defendants.”

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/owner-and-operator-india-base...

Oct 4 2022:

In Massive Op Against Cyber Fraud, CBI Raids 105 Locations Across India: https://www.ndtv.com/india-news/in-massive-op-against-cyber-...

On inputs from FBI and Interpol, CBI, police forces search 105 locations to combat cyber crime: https://indianexpress.com/article/india/cbi-operation-target...

Aug 4 2022: Fake call centre: Cyber cell contacts FBI, CBI & ED: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/dehradun/fake-call-...

They aren't beyond the reach of the law, it's just logistically hard. Imagine getting the cops to bother investigating your stolen laptop or something. Now multiply that by an international multi-agency investigation spanning 10,000 miles.

> * it's just logistically hard*

Sure. I am just pushing back on “very well enforced.” It’s not. Not out of malice. But because the problem is hard.

>And it is very well enforced on both sides.

That guy or gal calling your grandparents about that "fixing that virus" or "refunding that amazon purchase" begs to differ...

to me it's not racist, it just tells me more how competitive indians are when it comes to the tech industry.

during our college days our profs literalt recommended studying online resources in youtube made by indians, because they got better coverage than most of our curriculum. we laugh at their accent but we owe them a lot.

More important than a nationality of the hackers (to me at least) is the personality of the payer for services. It’s clearly mentioned in the article:

Solomon and Azima allege that Dechert undertook the hack-and-leak operation in the interest of its client, Sheikh Saud bin Saqr al-Qasimi, ruler of the Middle Eastern emirate of Ras Al Khaimah.

What kind of gun was used in a killing is much less important than who paid for the killing, no?

Where they not hackers from india?